1. Field of Endeavor
The present invention pertains generally to mapping equipment, and more particularly to the utilization of equipment used for the gathering, transformation and tecording of position and attributes data about selected points of interest in a more efficient way.
2. Related Art
Accident and other area mapping involve an equipment operator and a target positioning person or flag-person. The equipment operator aims distance and angle measuring equipment 10 at a point of interest, selects various attributes about that point and causes the equipment to store the raw or computed positional information for this point along with the attributes about this point in a data collection device 30. The flag-person moves the target or flag 40 to each new point of interest. The flag person does not “operate” any equipment, just moves the flag 40 to the next point of interest. As the flag-person is closer to the point of interest, the flag-person must often convey to the equipment operator what attributes need to be entered inot the data collector device 30 for the select point of interest or target.
Currently the equipment operator aims the distance and angle measuring equipment 10 at the target or flag 40 to obtain and store the raw range and angle position information that may later be converted into X, Y, Z position data or the X, Y, Z data may be computed before being stored on the data collector 30. The distance measurement equipment 10 includes but is not limited to laser distance measuring use various equipment. The data collector 30 may just store the information or may give a graphical representation or map of the data in 2 or 3 dimensions.